Gartner: Android will play catch up to iPad for years

One-sided tablet war

According to Gartner, the great tablet war has already been fought and won, with Apple's runaway success set to give the company the lion's share of the market for the next four years.

Currently, the fruity manufacturer has 69 per cent of the burgeoning tablet market thanks to the iPad and iPad 2, while Google has just 20 per cent to call its own.

Although Gartner sees Apple's share declining and Android's growing, Apple will still retain the largest slice of the tablet pie – with figures in 2015 expected to sit at 47 per cent to Jobs and co, and 39 per cent to Google.

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So what about the remaining fourteen per cent? The technology analyst expects the BlackBerry PlayBook's QNX platform to nab third place in the tablet race, with 10 per cent under its hat by 2015.

The remaining four per cent will probably go to outsiders, like Microsoft's Windows tablet platform which is unlikely to launch until next year, giving it a massive disadvantage against the likes of Apple.

Of course, this is all future-gazing speculation and by no means necessarily accurate; but until someone manages to get hold of some plutonium we won't be able to fire up the DeLorean and nip to 2015 to check.